evilzenscientist | Nothing of Any Quincyquonce

LEGO club – 4 Dec 2008

by ezs | Dec 4, 2008 | evilzenscientist, LEGO, Uncategorized

I spent a lot of time over the Thanksgiving week sorting and rebuilding the LEGO Mindstorms kits. Here and here.

Today all of the groups at LEGO club had a working robot; complete with two motors and the light sensor.

The challenge today was to make the robot roll forward in the ‘Shark Tank’ (the light coloured floor), detect the dark edge of the carpet, stop and then reverse up.

Initially all of the teams had a go at programming this; the usual combination of loops and guesswork. I then moved on to ‘human prototyping’. Two of the LEGO group – Ben and Jonathon – became my motors and sensors. I had the entire group verbally express what should be happening:

Ben walks forward

until

Jonathan is on the carpet

then

Ben walks backward

I introduced the concept of both the LEGO ‘move’ and ‘wait’ blocks.

The next iteration was much better; most of the teams got the move – wait – move concept; the difficulty was working on the sensor values. Showing the on-brick sensor values (reflected light on floor = 54; reflected light on dark carpet = 32) really helped – back to the human prototype – Jonathon held his arms in the air (the high value) and dropped his arms (low value).

Finally some debugging (greater than, less than confusion; tweaking sensor values) and everyone had a working ‘edge sensor robot’.

Here’s the visual:

Here is a link to the tiny program shark-pool-edge.rbt from this morning.

New switch

by ezs | Dec 3, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Gigabit switch arrived today. Installation was nice and simple – a 15 minute job. Looks good in the rack too.

I like the Netgear kit – still has steel casing, so it feels like it has substance.

Hardware!

by ezs | Dec 2, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I went mad and ordered a new rack-mountable 24 port Gigabit switch. Should arrive early next week; should be simple change control.

As an aside – I used Microsoft Live Search with Cashback! $13 in my pocket 😉

Infrastructure updates

by ezs | Nov 10, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’m moving my primary Active Directory and Kerberos box (which also hosts the internal DNS and DHCP) from Windows 2003 to Windows Server 2008 this evening.

That should free up a box to put System Center Operations Manager 2007 on to.

My goal is to get Operations Manager to map and display my home and lab infrastructure – and to alert on health and performance issues. I hope to use Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta; that will give me cross-platform monitoring. I’ll try and tie in some other partner tools to get some sexy mapping and alerting.